A tale of two cities, or Bauhaus for maps

I attended two shows back-to-back in London yesterday. Esri(UK) Annual Conference was daytime at the QE2 Centre in Westminster a stone's throw from the Parliament. London Geomob was that evening in Shoreditch, the swanky London digital hub where Ordnance Survey just opened the Geovation Hub.

If the 20 min tube ride in between might have been through a wormhole, such was the contrast, both meetups strove to do the same thing, substituting maps for arts as the Bauhaus movement: "founded with the idea of creating a 'total' work of art in which all arts, including architecture, would eventually be brought together".

Releasing data really works, Part VII

And now for something completely different - the original posts until Part VI are listed below - I ran across a nice map of Steve Feldman's: He also tried out free data and software to map UK flood maps, an up-scaled version not for professional re-use.

... now HOW open is open?

[Update: Part II is on my Medium professional channel 2½ year later: Almost open data]

A lot of (virtual) ink has flowed around opening up data, as in this blog, GISuser crowdsourcing open data (below left) etc. etc. And everyone is getting into the act, from White House (below center) and Whitehall (UK Cabinet Office) to the number of open data hits (below right).

Releasing data really works, Part III

More and more free data are available that are quality-controlled and verifiable. Guardian Data Blog's @smfrogers (now at Twitter) was quite sanguine about this:

Comment is free, but facts are sacred

A tale of two cities: web maps new and old

Last I posted on vector online GIS, and that appears to be gaining traction. Mapbox offers through TileMill and OpenStreetMaps editing. These are new an emerging technologies that are exciting, and it contrasts with Esri who offers a slew of tools on the desktop and in arcgis.com. WMS is for example still immature on giscloud.com (though it is OGC compliant now), as are the symbology and labels. They do not offer model builder like Esri or Qgis (thru Sextante). But they do offer a service to process GIS functions online and allow to load data direct from web source, avoiding costly down- & up-loads. Here I compare how I used a 180K vector dataset from NOAA NGDC described previously.

Gathering clouds over the horizon...

... intermittent sunshine and showers predicted tomorrow. No this is not a meteo prediction, but a metaphor for opportunities and confusion that cloud computing creates. I see it as a pressure-release valve, where the constant demand to deliver more for less is pushing both sectors, for-profit and not-for-profit.

A tale of two cities

Social mapping is the intersection on web mapping and social networking. I blogged earlier on webmaps and mashups, comparing streetmaps between Urumqi, the site of previous unrest in Xian province of western China, and Almaty in nearby southeast Kazakhstan. A friend who shall remain anonymous said they couldn't reach my Slideshare, so I posted a video of same on a Youtube designated channel. Now that they're safe, I post it again here.

Data tennis match

There is a frantic discussion over the UK Government Data Developers mailing list, over freeing UK postcodes, after the recent freeze of their provision to UK aid agencies. As a business user (not a developer) I use free area code data (kilometer precision), and paid my £50 for 1000 points from postcodeanywehere.co.uk (meter precision). This doesn't negate the need to call for freeing up data sources, but as business I must be practical and timely.

"East is east and west is west...", or is it?

Geo-meta-data news flashes:

quickly access web resources regardless of resource location via ESRI's geoportal extension

free metadata tools for the EU INPSIRE website using ESRI Irelands Be-Inspired site

quickly add data anywhere in the world, crowdsourcing debut on Google Map Maker

geocode data into the recently increased Google palette in the US at least announced